Joan
Aiken
was
the
youngest
child
of Canadian
writer
Jessie
Macdonald
and
American
father
and
Pultizer
Prize-winning
poet
Conrad
Aiken
who
had
moved
from
USA
to England
in 1920.
With
such
a literary
background
it was
hardly
surprising
that
Joan
Aiken
and
her
older
sister
Jane
Aiken
Hodge
should
become
writers
themselves.

With
over
60 published
works
Joan
Aiken
has
written
novels,
short
stories,
poetry
and
plays,
for
all
ages
including
several
adult
horror
and
fantasy
stories
but
it is
her
novels
for
children,
set
in the
time
of James
III
and
first
related
in 'The
Wolves
of Willoughby
Chase'
(1962)
that
she
is probably
best
known.
Awards
for
her
work
included
the
Guardian
Award
for
Children's
Literature
(1969)
and
the
Lewis
Carroll
Award
(1970).
A final
volume
in the
James
III
saga,
'Midwinter
Nightingale',
is due
to be
published
later
this
year.

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. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
.

John Alfred Terraine, historian,
born
15 January
1921,
died 28
December
2003

Born
in London
John
Terraine
was
educated
at Stamford
School,
Lincolnshire
and
Keble
College,
Oxford.
He worked
for
the
BBC
1944-63
and
was
the
moving
force
behind
the
26 part
series '
The
Great
War'.
His
first
book
was
'Mons:
The
Retreat
to Victory'
(1960).

He
left
the
BBC
and
became
freelance
on the
publication
of his
book
'Haig:
The
Educated
Soldier'
(1963),
in which
he was
more
sympathetic
to Haig
than
was
the
popular
view
although
many
historians
have
since
come
round
to his
way
of thinking.
From
1966-68
he wrote
and
presented
Thames
TV's
'The
Life
and
Times
of Lord Mountbatten',
after
which
he concentrated
on the
written
word.

In
his
book 'The Right Of The Line: The Royal Air Force In The European War, 1939-1945'
(1985)
he surprised
many
in his
criticism
of Bomber
Command's
strategy
which
appeared
to be
a logical
development
of Haig's
in WW1.

In 1986 he was elected an
Honorary
Fellow
of Keble
College,
in 1987
a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
and
he was
the founding
president
(1980-97)
and
then
patron
of the
Western Front Association.

Scottish poet Don Paterson has won the prestigious TS Eliot Prize for poetry for the second time in six years.
Paterson, from Dundee has become the first person to be awarded the Poetry Book Society honour more than once, previously won in 1997.

The 40 year old Paterson, who is a writer, editor and musician, won the £10,000 prize for his book
Landing Light. The TS Eliot Prize is the “prize most poets want to win” according to the
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.
The Chairman of the judges, George Szirtes, said: "Don Paterson offers what Eliot demanded: complexity and intensity of emotion, an intuitive understanding of tradition and what it makes possible, and, at the same time, a freshness that is like clear spring water. His work is superbly authoritative, deeply felt, playful and properly ambitious."

This new edition of OXDNB will become available in September. It has 60 volumes and will retail at £7,500, or £6,500 for those who order it before 30 September.

It will be the first wholesale update since the original Dictionary of National Biography, a grand Victorian enterprise, since supplemented by extra volumes, decade by decade. However, it will not retain the sublety of its origins, in that it will give candid portraits of its subjects. Gays, adulterers, drunkards will be referred to plainly as such, which will undoubtedly make for shorter essays.

The number of women in the dictionary has risen from 4% to 10% of the total entries and many of the Irish rebels who fought the British in Dublin in 1916 make their debut as Britishers!

The bookbinders Cedric Chivers, once one of Bath's proudest business names,
has closed after 120 years of serving the book trade in and around Bath. In its heyday, the company employed 300 but following buyouts and major redundancies over the past 20 years
the staff had been reduced
to 25 when they were
made redundant at their
Pucklechurch, near Bristol,
location.

The
assets, however, have
now been acquired by
Cromwell Press Ltd.
and the business will
be combined with that
of another firm of bookbinders
owned by Cromwell, Period
Bookbinders. The combined
new firm will be moving
to new purpose designed
premises in Trowbridge
in the next two months.

Whatever your taste in books it is difficult to escape the influence of the Gothic. In literary terms the Gothic style took off in the eighteenth century. The earliest works included Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and the works of Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe. Indeed, the latter took the popularity of the Gothic romance to such new heights that it became the subject of satire - most famously in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

From these eighteenth century novels we can see the emergence of key Gothic features: mystery, suspense and illusion. They utilise nature (especially the weather and trees), landscape, foreign climes, historical settings, a mysterious stranger, the supernatural and architecture. It was the easy identification of such features that made the genre ripe for Jane Austen's treatment of it in Northanger Abbey where the heroine looks for danger in the places that the Gothic romance taught her it might lie, but fails to see the real but rather everyday traps being laid for her.

The use of mystery and suspense kept the early forms of the work from being too explicit, most famously in The Mysteries of Udolpho where the heroine faints dead away at the site of something behind a veil. The eventual revelation of what this actually was is much less terrifying than the suspense of wondering what it might be.

The nineteenth century treatment of Gothic elements is much more sophisticated. As well as the satires of Austen and Thomas Love Peacock more serious treatments of Gothic ideas can be found in the works of Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters. Frankenstein, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are not Gothic novels in the way that many of the eighteenth century versions where. Rather than writing being driven by the need to be Gothic, appropriate Gothic elements are selected and used sparingly in a more conventional narrative that does not try to frighten its readers on every page for the sake of it. So in Jane Eyre we have the incident in the Red Room and the idea of the Mad Woman in the Attic with her night time excursions suggestive of the supernatural; in Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte makes good Gothic use of her landscape, dreams, death and buildings; in Frankenstein, landscape, the weather and fear of what we cannot control are all utilized.

Frankenstein is particularly interesting in the biography of the Gothic genre as the book is actually much less Gothic and much less graphic than anything to appear on our cinema or television screens. Modern media and the liberalisation of taste have moved the Gothic Romance into full horror mode. Yet as well as full blown horror in the writing of popular novelists such as James Herbert and Stephen King, the more elite literary market has also continued its love affair with using elements of Gothic. This can be seen in a wide variety of writers and genres: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Peter Høeg, Margaret Atwood and Peter Ackroyd for example. Elements of Gothic have also become a regular feature of many children’s works including the Harry Potter series and R. L. Steine’s Goosebumps.

The initial use of Gothic novels for early film helped bring its visual side (always stronger than characterisation in the earliest works) to life. As well as spawning a whole industry of Nightmares on Elm Street and Friday 13ths, it has influenced the more high-brow visual and art markets with the works of people like the Chapman brothers being heavily, and often shockingly, Gothic.

Whilst it is true that some aspects of the Gothic predate the eighteenth century (Shakespeare, for example, uses forests and the supernatural) it was in the quick popularity of these works of Ann Radcliffe and others, and the thoroughness of their Gothic style, that large numbers of people were for the first time able to indulge whatever part of our human nature draws us to the Gothic as a means perhaps of rationalising, or safely exhausting, our fears over what we do not understand and cannot control.

The
winner for
the overall 'Whitbread
Book of the Year' £25,000
prize
on 27th January was
Mark Haddon’s 'The
Curious Incident
of the Dog in the
Night-time', a tale
of a 15-year-old-boy
with Asperger's syndrome.
Runner up was the Whitbread
1st novel award winner,
DBC Pierre's Vernon
God Little. The other
finalists were:

Epsom Annual Charity Book Fair, Friday 20th (10am to 8pm) and Saturday 21st
February (9am to 3pm). Epsom Methodist Church, Ashley Road, Epsom.
Very large charity sale in aid of Epsom Methodist Church Development Appeal
and NCH.

Next Month: The
feature for March will be on Collecting Books about the
Assassination of John
F. Kennedy by Les Bolland